LION OF STEEL
A Medieval Romance
Sons of Christopher de Lohr
Part of the de Lohr Dynasty
By Kathryn Le Veque
CHAPTER ONE
Year of Our Lord 1247
Axminster Castle
Seat of the Earls of Axminster
The rain waspouring.
The thunder was pounding.
Lightning streaked across the sky as the battle for control of Axminster Castle entered its third day. Three days of severe weather, chaos, blood, death, and frustration.
But the battle, in truth, had started long before the armies took the field.
It all began when a certain Lord Rickard Tatworth of Tatworth Castle, about ten miles to the north of Axminster, offered for Lady Isabel de Kerrington’s hand. As the sister to the Earl of Axminster and heiress to the earldom because her brother was childless, she was considered a prestigious marital prospect, if not a little old, and Tatworth had ambitions that he should be the next Earl of Axminster when Eduard de Kerrington keeled over. The man was of bad health, anyway, and that wasn’t a secret. He was married, once, but his wife had produced no children.
That left Lady Isabel as a very great prize.
But Isabel was also quite intelligent—and past childbearing age herself—so when Tatworth began to send missives of his admiration and even love for her, she burned them. Eduard thought it was quite hilarious that his spinster sister should have a suitor, which only made Isabel furious. Even at their ages—with Isabel at forty years and Eduard at fifty years and four—they fought like siblings often fought at much younger ages. Eduard teased and Isabel was stoic until they were alone.
Then she used any weapon she could get her hands on against him.
Axminster, however, continued on as a great seat of training and learning in spite of the antics of the brother and sister who were at her helm. Eduard was a great earl, benevolent and generous to his vassals, and Axminster had become a training ground for royal troops because of his relationship with King Henry III. Eduard was a personal friend, a man who had supplied the king with both support and money when he needed it, and Henry had a high regard for Axminster.
He had an even higher regard for Lady Isabel, who had created a school of manners and learning for the daughters of the nobles of England, a school of such reputation that everyone wanted to send their daughters there. Under Lady Isabel’s tutelage, young women learned skills and grace to become some of the finest ladies in all of England and highly sought-after wives.Axminster Angels, they were known as. Young ladies with the most excellent grace in all the land.
Even if their patroness, Lady Isabel, chased her brother around the castle with a hot fire poker from time to time.
Not surprisingly, the de Kerrington spinster was a formidable woman, and when Tatworth started his campaign of love and devotion, Isabel was not only annoyed, she was also embarrassed. It was made worse by Eduard’s taunting, but that taunting caught up with him. Through karma or fate or divinehumor, Eduard was teasing her one night and laughed so hard that he choked on a chicken bone. It pierced his throat and he died of an infection almost a month later. Though Isabel was saddened, it seemed that she had the last laugh in the courtship of Lord Tatworth.
So she thought.
As the heiress, and calling herself the Countess of Axminster after her brother’s death, Isabel ruled Axminster with an iron fist, far stronger than her brother ever had, but Lord Tatworth, only seeing a vulnerable woman—because the man was clearly blind—and enraged by her constant rejections, decided to take matters into his own hands.
And that’s why the battle was raging.
Tatworth fielded a large army. Reinforced with an ally in Richard St. Martin of Wardour Castle, he threatened to march on Axminster and force Lady Isabel to marry him. She refused, in no uncertain terms, but she also secretly sent word to an Axminster ally who had the biggest army she could think of—
Christopher de Lohr, Earl of Hereford and Worcester.
Hereford could field thousands of men. She knew this because she’d heard her brother speaking of the man he fondly called “Chris.” But she didn’t only send word to Hereford—she also sent word to the Earl of Coventry of Isenhall Castle, Antoninus de Shera, as well as to Roger Bigod, the Earl of Norfolk at Arundel Castle. Those men alone brought thousands with them, and when Norfolk brought his own reinforcements in the House of de Winter, it turned out to be ten thousand men against Tatworth’s four thousand. A four thousand he had been very proud of until de Lohr rolled down from the north like a ball of fire.
It had been three very long, very difficult days.
Axminster, as a royal training ground, had about a thousand men inside the castle, which was kept bottled up while Tatworthand St. Martin tried to scale the walls and gain access. Once de Lohr and Bigod arrived, however, it turned into a massacre because Tatworth’s men refused to leave. They didn’t merely try to defend themselves—they fought like banshees, and when they’d managed to capture a few of Norfolk’s men, they cut them into pieces and launched them back at the surrounding army.
There were pieces of chopped soldiers all over the place.
